My blog posts and articles

This is another post from my blog’s archives, from May 2015. I explore the history and current state of the explosion in digital photography and image transmission over mobile and hardwired networks. Starting with a history of the cameraphone and winding up with a discussion of global bandwidth share taken up by images and video, this one was a lot of fun to write.

Fun facts:

It’s estimated that 5.7–6 trillion photos were taken in 2015.

If you were to print out all the photos posted to Instagram every day, you’d be able to fill an Olympic sized swimming pool in one workweek

There are now 20–25 times more photo-taking devices in circulation today than in 1999.

I wrote this all the way back in 2011 when I was a staff writer for Techli, but I thought I’d share it here for two reasons: chatbots are hot and everyone seems to avoid talking about the primitiveness of the technology, and it’s a peek into what my writing was like when I was just starting out.

Twelve weeks of newsletters!

Skip to the next section if you don’t care for navel-gazing administrata.

It’s now been 12 weeks since I started this newsletter. Despite some occasional delays, I’ve managed to keep my promise of publishing it weekly.

In the interest of being transparent about the progress of this little “experiment”, I decided to compile and publish a report about it. In it, I share charts and graphs depicting various metrics most people keep very close to the chest.

Announcing some minor changes

TLDR: I am rebranding this newsletter to “The Rowley Report”. If you receive it via email, basically nothing will change for you except the subject lines.

There are a couple of minor tweaks and changes I’m planning to implement over the next week or two. Here’s what I was thinking:

I am re-branding the newsletter. This is the last edition that will be called “JDR’s Newsletter – #xyz”. Future editions will be published as “The Rowley Report”.

I will no longer number the newsletters in the subject line. Edition numbers will now be kept at the bottom.

Instead of cross-posting this newsletter to the feed on my website, I will instead be publishing it to a Medium publication at http://rowley.report/. (As of the time of writing, I haven’t set that up yet, but I have the domain.) I will migrate all old copies of my newsletter from my main domain (JasonDRowley.com) to the feed on that site. I will continue to publish blog posts and other content as usual on my main site.

If you receive this newsletter via Tinyletter, you will continue to do so. You will not need to also subscribe at Rowley.report.

I think that Fortune writer Kevin Fitcuard’s analysis of the AOL acquisition holds true for the Yahoo deal as well: Verizon, like most mobile carriers, has basically saturated the market for wireless signups and is now looking to acquire advertising technologies and the media outlets that draw in eyeballs.

As an aside, one of the most notable casualties of the decline of Yahoo! is Tumblr, from which its parent company just wrote off another $482 million in good will value. In light of the fact that Tumblr is basically worth nothing, NYU marketing professor Scott Galloway commented that Tumblr was the biggest tech M&A debacle of the past decade.

The market didn’t see Pokemon Go coming

One of the most surprising things to me, in light of news stories about Pokemon Go raking in huge amounts of money, is that the company officially raised only $25 million in venture funding, the majority of which came from Google, Nintendo and the holding company for Pokemon’s brand assets.

Back when news of Nintendo’s investment broke in October 2015, there was basically zero reaction from the stock market. Seriously, go back and look at the historic chart of Nintendo’s stock price in Japan or its ADR here in the States.

Bupkis. There’s not even an appreciable jump in volume to speak of, despite that investment news being the among the first stirrings of Nintendo’s interest in entering the incredibly lucrative mobile gaming market.

In other Pokemon Go news, video game industry blogger and enthusiast “ZhugeEX” published an in-depth 5000 word essay about Pokemon Go. If you haven’t read anything about the crazy, bonkers success of that game yet, ZhugeEX’s piece is a good place to start. (Or you could go back to last week’s newsletter and check out the links I suggested.) His site also has good commentary on the Chinese video game industry.

Related: It is chanterelle season in Chicago and elsewhere around the country. I personally picked a few pounds of these wild mushrooms over the past couple of days and will be going back into the forest throughout the week. Consider reaching out to your local mycological society/club and go on a fungus foraging foray with them!

Elle magazine, the beauty and lifestyle magazine, recently published its list of women in tech to watch in 2016. My two cents: it is really great to see women in technology get attention from the broader press.

Version One VC’s Angela Tran Kingyens compiled her book on marketplace businesses down into a 58-slide deck and shared it on Slideshare. Her book was in a list of other resources I compiled and shared last month.